Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies for Giant Leaps in Work and Life

by Ozan Varol

Embracing the Far-Fetched Imagine a glass bottle with its base pointed toward a light. If you put half a dozen bees and flies into the bottle, which species would find its way out first? Most people assume the answer is bees. After all, bees are known for their intelligence. They can learn highly complex tasks—such as lifting or sliding a cap to access a sugar solution in a lab—and teach what they learned to other bees.23 But when it comes to finding their way out of the bottle, the bees’ intelligence gets in their way. The bees love the light. They’ll keep bumping up against the base of the bottle—located at the light source—until they die of exhaustion or hunger. In contrast, the flies disregard “the call of the light,” as Maurice Maeterlinck writes in The Life of the Bee. They “flutter wildly hither and thither” until they stumble on the opening at the other end of the bottle that restores their liberty.24 The flies and the bees, respectively, represent what’s known as divergent and convergent thinking. The flies are the divergent thinkers, fluttering freely until they find the exit. The bees are the convergent thinkers, zeroing in on the seemingly most obvious exit path with a behavior that is ultimately their undoing. Divergent thinking is a way of generating different ideas in an open-minded and free-flowing manner—like flies bouncing around in a glass bottle.